Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Stross on Convention Panels

Academics spend a lot of time at conventions and conferences. Indeed, at the moment, I’m on the planning committee for a AALS Business Associations conference. So I was interested to see writer Charles Stross’ series of posts about his experiences and thoughts on the subject of running a successful conference panel. I think we can learn some valuable insights from his post:

We don’t usually give a lot of thought to the venue in which a panel discussion takes place, but that’s a mistake. Get the environment wrong, and the panel is doomed to failure before it starts. So here’s what I know about how you should arrange the environment for a panel.

There is a standard format for most panel discussions. In general, if you’ve got a group of speakers and an audience — and the two are not interchangeable — messing with the standard format is a bad idea.

The standard format is: start with a room, with walls and a door. The venue needs to be reasonably sound-proof, lest outsiders drown out the panelists (or disrupt their thoughts, which can be equally bad). Screen partitions dividing up the floor of a vast, echoing echoing aircraft hangar like venue with other panelists trying to out-shout each other over the dividers do not work. Neither do rooms located adjacent to a hall full of happy clappy types holding a revival sing-along, or a band rehearsing for the evening concert, or a disco. (I speak from experience of all of the above.)

The room should not be too hot or too cold. In practice, this means it needs working air conditioning or central heating and windows that open. Sauna huts are not suitable venues for hour-long discourses on the philosophical roots of H. P. Lovecraft; refrigerator warehouses don’t work too well either. General rule of thumb: it will be warmer in the room when there is a packed audience inside. Human beings put out roughly 0.5kW of heat per person, so an audience of 60 people is like having ten electric fan heaters going at full blast. If it’s warm when it’s empty, it will be unpleasantly hot when it’s full.

Lighting helps. Not too much lighting; at one recent convention the main function area had a stage, and stage lighting — and a low ceiling, so that there was a bank of stage lights glaring at the panelists from just above eye level: every time I glanced at the audience I ended up with purple after-images burned into my retinas. If the panelists are asking for sun screen and mirrorshades, this is a bad sign.

There needs to be a table at the front, with chairs for all the participants (too many chairs is okay; not enough chairs is bad), and chairs for the audience facing the participants. Putting the participants on a stage or illuminating them with floodlights is optional, but the audience need to be able to see their faces. A circle of chairs with nobody in a position of authority sounds nice and politically correct, but once you get past about 20 seats it gets unmanageably big; also, it encourages audience participation ... which may not be what you want, if you’re running a panel where some talking heads are meant to be holding forth from positions of authority.

If there are seats for more than about 20 people in the audience, you need to provide the speakers with amplification. Whether you think they need amplification or not in that particular room is irrelevant — some of your speakers will have laryngitis, some will be shy and speak in a low whisper, and on occasion it may be necessary for the moderator on the panel to firmly overrule a too-enthusiastic member of the audience.

Ideally each speaker needs a microphone of their own. Sharing a mike with a fellow speaker who has halitosis is Not Fun. Neither is playing capture-the-flag with an obsessive hoarder who has got the Talking Stick and won’t let go. If it’s a big room (more than 20 seats) and the panel is going to take questions, budget for an extra radio mike and a gofer who can scurry around the audience, otherwise the audience are going to be treated to the panelists answering questions that they can’t hear.

It’s a good idea to have pre-printed name plates available for the panelists to stick on the table in front of the audience, so that the audience can tell them apart. Such name plates (or just folded pieces of paper) need to be IN LARGE PRINT so that people at the back of the room can read them.

The panelists will probably need something to drink if they’re talking for an hour. A jug of water and some paper cups are an absolute minimum; make sure there are enough clean cups for each panelist, and keep the jug full during the panel. Too much is better than too little; estimate half a litre of water per panelist per hour and you won’t go far wrong. Beer, coffee, and other liquids also work well and a well-run conventions usually have a green room with staff ready to take orders from panelists, and deliver their chosen beverages.

He plans more posts on the subject. I plan to link them.